There’s a chance that in the 1990s, you were more familiar with neighborhoods on GeoCities than with the neighborhoods in your own town. As one of the most popular and oldest (nearly 15 years running) sites for self expression on the web, GeoCities paved the way for other sites which would offer a sense of community and networking capabilities. Because it was one of the first ways for people to freely and openly become engaged with the internet, GeoCities will always be an important part of web history.

Yahoo! announced that it will close the site on October 26, 2009, steering users towards their paid service instead. We have been archiving GeoCities sites for years in our crawls, but, as goes with the territory of being web archivists, we want to make sure to gather as many of the pages as possible before the looming end of an era, 10-26-2009. If you have a page with GeoCities or are a fan of a particular page, please use our special collections page to ensure its preservation. Additionally, please refer to another independent project, the Archive Team, who is working to save cultural information that may be lost with the site closing. Yahoo! is also offering valuable advice at their help center.